Troubleshooting steps when migrating from Sametime 11.5 Pre-Release to Premium

Hello all,

Right after the release of Sametime 11.5 Premium, I was eager to upgrade our Sametime environment from the Pre-Release environment to the Premium Release.

At first sight it went very well to do the upgrades but after some testing I realized there were some issues. For instance, when we loaded the Sametime Web client, the client kept on loading without showing any information.

After logging in in the Sametime mobile client, no chat contacts were visible.

In the Sametime meetings interface, I was able to log in but when I wanted to create a new Sametime meeting Room with a password, nothing happened when I clicked on the button START or when I wanted to Save & Copy the meeting link.

So there was clearly an issue with the link to MongoDB…a new feature in the Sametime meetings Premium version. Together with HCL Support we looked into the issue and found out what was going on.

These were the steps we followed to get some debugging information from the configuration

Sametime Proxy Server

Open the  “logging.properties” file located in the “conf” subfolder.

Uncomment the following lines:

com.ibm.level=FINE

com.ibm.handlers = 2localhost.org.apache.juli.AsyncFileHandler

Take a backup and remove all the files under the “Log” folder and restart the Sametime Proxy Server  and check in the logfiles what’s happening when you logged in again in the webclient.

Sametime Community Server

Open the sametime.ini and locate the [debug] section

Add the following entry to get detailed logging: VP_TRACE_ALL=1

Take a backup and remove all the files from below two folders:

Trace

IBM_TECHNICAL_SUPPORT

Restart the Community Server and reproduce the issue.

Run stdiag to collect the logs in a zip file

For Windows => Domino\stdiagzip.bat For Linux => /local/notesdata> sh stdiagzip.sh

After inspection of the resulted logfiles, HCL Support saw the following issue:

WARNING [Chuck the postman’s dispatching thread.1] com.ibm.rtc.stproxy.cluster.ClusterManager.serverLoggedOut CLFRX0002W: Sametime Proxy server is disconnected from the server on host CN=SAMETIME/O=GW-SRV with the error 80000224.

WARNING [Chuck the postman’s dispatching thread.1] com.ibm.rtc.stproxy.cluster.ServerLogin.loggedOut CLFRX0011W: Unable to log in to the Sametime community server CN=SAMETIME/O=GW-SRV. Error message is 80000224

So it seemed that the Sametime Proxy could not connect to the Community Server.

I checked the Sametime.ini file and the correct Organization was mentioned at the line

[ST_ORG_NAME=GW-SRV]

There is an LTPAToken created for SSO between the mail server and the community Server to get Sametime integration in Verse.

In the [AuthToken] section of the sametime.ini I checked the presence of the correct value

ST_TOKEN_TYPE=LTPAToken

I also checked if the IP Address of the Proxy Server was added in the stconfig.nsf database.

“Community Trusted IPS” under community connectivity.

After restart of the Domino Community Server and the Sametime Proxy server, the issue in the web and the mobile client was still present.

HCL Support suggested the following changes:

In the stproxyconfig.xml update the token domain.

<tokenDomain>groupwave.be</tokenDomain>

… </configuration>

In the chatlogging.ini, update the MongoDB user name & password

CL_MONGO_USER=

CL_MONGO_PASSWORD=

To make sure that the correct credentials are used to connect to the MongoDB

Once done, restart both the community & proxy server.

After restart, the issue was still there. Damn !

In the logs we saw that there was an issue with convomap on the Sametime Community Server. It kept on crashing because it failed to to find the class path for convomap. In the stconvomap log we saw the following:

201202_153746.704,INF,JL ,trying to create JVM

201202_153746.933,INF,JL ,JVM created OK

201202_153746.999,INF,JL ,JVMBridge::getMain: Cannot find main class, class name = com/hcl/sametime/convomap/sa/STConvoMapSA

201202_153746.999,INF,JL ,JVMBridge#loadJVM: Error getting main class, aborting… 201202_153746.999,INF,JL ,JLaunch Terminated

So maybe there was something wrong with the ConvoMapSA.jar file ?

I copied over the ConvoMapSA.jar file from another installation and restarted the Community Server and the proxy server….Tadaa !! Problem solved !

Hold on, can we now create a Sametime Meeting Room ??? Damn, still an issue there….

After checking the logs of the meeting server we saw that there was an issue to reach the MongoDB server which is new in Sametime 11.5 Premium. In the Pre-Release there was no dependency to MongoDB to be able to create a new meeting.

HCL Support suggested to adapt the docker-compose.yml file to include the following in the Catalog section

extra_hosts:

– “FQDN of your proxy server:IP Address”

– “FQDN of your mongodb server:IP Address”

When you do this you need to take the following steps to reconfigure the Sametime Meeting server

docker-compose down

take a backup of the ‘jitsi-config’ directory if you have your own certificate stored in /web/keys

delete the ‘jitsi-config’ directory

docker-compose up -d

After this change, all issues were resolved and since then we can create moderated, password-protected meetings from browser and mobile client.

I want to give a big thank you to the HCL Support Team who was very reactive and due to the screen takeover we could look together to the issue. Big Thanks !

Advertisement

HCL Domino SSO with AzureAD

Proving that Domino can integrate with several other technologies is something we do on a regular basis, just to show the customers that Domino is an open platform.

For authentication, we did already several SSO configurations between Domino Directory and MS Active Directory by using ADFS and SAML authentication.

We now have a question from a customer that is using O365 heavily. They have Domino running with some applications that are integrated in Sharepoint and they use the HCAA Notes client for certain users that need to open the Domino databases in a client. 2 years ago we have set up an ADFS infrastructure with an ADFS Proxy for external access and configured SSO between Domino and Active Directory for web access and HCAA access so that users can log in in the applications with their Microsoft credentials.

The customer has a synchronization set up between Active Directory and Azure Active Directory and wants to migrate the Domino SSO from on-prem ADFS to Azure AD.

In the beginning, Domino supported only a certain set of Identity Providers, although we managed to set up SSO between Domino and other non-supported IDPs successfully 🙂

Now Domino officially supports Azure Active Directory as an Identity Provider (IDP) so I thought we have no excuse to set up what the customer wants. Before setting this up at the customer, I’ve set up a test environment at GroupWave with an SSL protected site and of course I’m sharing the technical details with whomever is interested because that’s just what HCL Ambassadors do 🙂

Azure Active Directory (AAD) settings

To be able to manage AAD you need to go the Azure Active Directory Admin center, https://aad.portal.azure.com Click on Enterprise applications and then on New Application to be able to register the Domino website as as an application

Create your own application

Fill in a name that you choose and select to register the application to integrate with AAD and click the create button

Once the application is created, you will be directed to the configuration page of the application.

Click on Set up single sign on and choose for SAML authentication.

You will have to fill in the URL of the application that you want to link, this is the URL of your Domino internet site. As an attribute you can go with the defaults, you need to be sure that user.mail is in there so that you use the internet mail address as a unique identifier between the two directories.

Download the federation Metadata XML file

Assign a test user or a group to your application so that they can authenticate

Go to your Domino Administrator client and create and IDP Catalog database on your server. Make sure you give it the name idpcat.nsf and select Show Advanced templates to be able to see the IdP Catalog template in the list.

In the IdP Catalog database, click on Add IdP Config and fill in the following fields

In the hostname field, fill in the name of the internet site and the IP Address that you use

In the Service Provider ID fill in the URL of the site In the IdP name field you may fill in a name as a reference for yourself, this field is just a comment.

Click on the button Import XML file and browse to the XML file you downloaded from your Enterprise Application.

This import will fill in the Single sign-on service URL Field and the fields on the Advanced tab of the configuration document.

Save the document with Ctrl-S to be able to go to the next step. On the certificate Management tab, click on the button Create SP Certificate

You will be asked to fill in a Company name, you may fill in whatever you want

Double click in the IdP Configuration document and fill in the Domino URL, in this case HTTPS://calendar.groupwave.be

Click on the button Export SP XML and you will see the ServiceProvider.xml file getting attached to the document. Save and Close the document and go to your internet sites view to change the affected site.

In your internet site document, go to the tab Domino Web Engine and change the Session authentication type to SAML

When you click on the button Open IdP Configuration, you will be redirected to the correct IdP Configuration document that you created.

Save and close you Internet site document and restart the HTTP Task on your Domino Server.

Open up your browser and surf to the URL of your application. In this case it is https://calendar.groupwave.be You will see that you get redirected to Office 365 and if you were already logged in, than you will be redirected to Domino.

Using Domino…but not already V11 ?

Are you a customer running an older version of Domino or are you a customer that used Domino (Lotus Notes) in the past ?

Whatever type of customer you are, I think it’s worthwile to notice that this product has experienced a huge transformation since it has been embraced by an enthousiastic team of people at HCL that works closely with their HCL Ambassadors and the “yellow” community.

You can’t deny that the last year you see a lot of announcements passing by in the newsfeeds of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Announcements around Domino Volt, Verse, Sametime, Connections.

I like to call Domino the “Swiss army knife” of your organization since you have all you need in one single platform and this all offered with an attractive license model. Just check this blog post to get all the details.

Have you read, between all the other posts, the announcement of Project 11 ? It’s worthwhile to browse the site and discover yourself why it is so interesting to upgrade to V11 and to benefit from all the new stuff that is built in and around Domino, all included in your license.

And while you see all those messages about Domino V11, you can look already forward into the future because HCL has announced their “Domino Early Access Program“. You can subscribe to this program as a customer as well as a business partner to test drive new features that will be available in Domino V12.

As you can see, there is no excuse to take a look at what’s happening in the world of Domino.

If you want more info, just drop me a note and we can have a meeting where I can elaborate more on the different new featues and the roadmap of Domino for the coming months, year.

Think2019 – It’s a recap

Last week, I attended #Think2019, to get an update on what’s coming up for Notes/Domino and the rest of the Collaboration Family Software. We have seen a lot of exciting news and may say that the future of Notes/Domino is bright and promising !

Last year they released Domino V10 on the 10th of October during a world premiere that was attended by a large group of people, both online and at the worldwide events itself. Since this launch, they released V10.0.1, the AppDev Pack, Domino Query Language (DQL), Domino mobile apps on iPad and now preparing for V11.

On tuesday, I attended ICS Collaboration day that was kicked off with the following true story…

Video

Luis Guirigay spoiled us with a fantastic demo where he showed the integration of Domino Applications in Office365 by taking advantage of the Domino AppDev Pack and the use of Node.JS and Node-Red.

In the video at the right, you can see how notifications can be send to MS Teams, Slack etc and how you can use an Alexa echo speaker to interact with your Domino Server as a user to approve requests or as an Administrator to monitor your server.

DQL Explorer

One of the main new features that they’ve released with V10, was Domino Query Language (DQL).

Video

Domino Query Language (DQL) is a facility running in Domino core allowing for a terse shorthand syntax for finding documents according to a wide variety of complexity of terms.

In the video at the left, you can see a demo of the new DQL Explorer which allows for a business user to easily create his own queries to retrieve data and export to csv for example.

The Beat Goes On !

This year they will release V11 with a focus on the UI and the speed of the client.

Video

The integration with Active Directory will be tighter so that synchronisation of data between the Domino Directory and Active Directory will be simplified.

Sametime will have a refreshed backend and frontend with persistent chat across all clients.

In the video at the right, you can see the session we attended about what’s coming up this year.

 

I also attended a session about Verse and Verse On Premise where they mentionned that more and more the features of iNotes will pop up in the Verse client. This is a clear sign that customers that use iNotes slowly may start looking at Verse as there next browser-based mail client.

As you can see, there is a lot happening in the world of Notes/Domino, and this is only the beginning.

On the 14th of March, you will have the opportunity to get to see a sneak peek of the new V11 client. Register for this webcast by filling in the registration form

 

 

Domino V11 Jam – Report

Last week there was the Domino V11 Jam, one of the ten global sessions organized, and the decision was made to organize also a session in Brussels.

With about 24 people we gathered together to think about interesting ideas for future Notes/Domino releases and especially to feed extra content to IBM/HCL to prepare for the next upcoming V11 release.

The Jam was led by Andrew Manby, product manager of Notes/Domino. Andrew emphasized the fact that V10 was mostly focused on the Server to get it up to speed for more modern technologies. For V11, they will focus more on the user interface. Especially for the Notes client.

During the presentation there were also some newbies presented:

– Domino V10 will be available for IBM i

– Domino Mobile Apps will also be released for Android later this year

– IBM Enterprise Integrator coming for V10 and V11

– Sametime 10 will be able to run without the need for a browser plugin

– Sametime 10 will also get rid of its dependency of DB2 and Websphere

– Simpler integration between Active Directory and Domino Directory

After the presentation we could brainstorm about four important squares ( Outcomes, Tasks, Challenges and Decisions) for  Administrators, Developers, users and executives.

After lunch we had another brainstorm session to categorize different ideas into no brainers/must haves, interesting to get introduced and nice to have.

Lots of interesting ideas have been noted and will be collected together with the outcomes of the nine other Jam sessions.

The collection of the different and even common ideas will be presented during an online Jam session. For Europe the session will be held the 30th of january at 3PM. You can subscribe for the session here

Recently Forrester published their Total Economic Impact study to show how companies can beneft from using Domino as their application development platform. The study can be accessed here.

2nd consecutive breaking news for Notes/Domino

Last year in October we were surprised about the big announcement that IBM made about their partnership with HCL. At that moment a lot of questions arised immediately about the future of the platform, the responsibilities of HCL and so on.

Development of the products Notes, Domino, Traveler and Sametime were the responsibility of HCL, bringing the message to the market and working close together with HCL about the roadmap of the products, was IBM’s job.

In Q1 2018 I attended IBM Think and I was thrilled about the great interest of the attendees in the Collaboration sessions. All sessions about DominoV10 were packed and HCL came out with a revolutionary product, Notes on an iPad !

HCL started talking about new features coming up in Domino V10, beta versions were released and about a year after the partnership announcement, we had a global launch event of the final Domino V10 version !

#domino2025 became #dominoforever with a clear message to the world: “Domino is far from dead, start to fear the beast !”

Recently HCL and IBM announced that HCL is acquiring a select set of IBM Software products. The products involved in the deal are

• Appscan for secure application development,
• BigFix for secure device management,
• Unica (on-premise) for marketing automation,
• Commerce (on-premise) for omni-channel eCommerce,
• Portal (on-premise) for digital experience,
• Notes & Domino for email and low-code rapid application development, and
• Connections for workstream collaboration.

This deal means a lot for the future of the products where I see a lot of positive energy and drive within HCL to evolve the products to something every customers wants to have.

I know some of the customers have migrated to another platform, mainly for mail. A lot of them still have applications running. Applications who make their business run, applications that can be brought to a next level, integrated in their platform where they moved to. That way, their new and existing investment is well spent !

Customers that haven’t touched Notes/Domino yet, will be surprised about the power of the product and the many possibilities it has to offer to solve business problems they have currently.

In a recent article, written by David Gewirtz, he mentioned this

“Notes was Salesforce before Salesforce. It was Dropbox before Dropbox. It was SharePoint before SharePoint. It was Atlassian before Atlassian. It was Zendesk before Zendesk. It was ServiceNow before ServiceNow. It was Workday before Workday. In some implementations, it was even Github before Github.”

With that conclusion, I open up the floor for this new journey !

Get all the latest news about the progress on http://www.ibm.com/destinationdomino

Have a good day !

Domino V10 launch is approaching

The countdown has started !

If you were not already aware that there is a new version of Domino V10 coming, then the moment has come to get up to speed.

You can use the DestinationDomino landing page as your source of information, or better, come over to the Domino V10 Launch event in Brussels on, what did you tought, the 10th of the 10th month 🙂

Subscribe here to be part of this launch event and speak to other enthousiast participants.

If you checked your schedule and you can’t make it ? No worries, you can be part of the official launch on the 9th of october via the Facebook Live Event.

Hope to see you there !

Kris

ICON UK 2018

Hello all,

earlier in september there was this nice, get-together, conference going on in Birmingham. The team of Icon UK did a great job organizing this 2-day event ! A big thank you goes out to them !

At day 1, the floor was opened by IBM with lots of updated information about #domino2025 and the slowly closer coming release of Domino V10. You could see in the audience that everybody is excited about this new version and the fact there is again a lot of fuzz around Domino.

I had a session about setting up a hybrid configuration between your on-prem set up and the IBM Cloud.

The organisation had a very nice idea to create badges to reward people who were present as speaker/sponsor which resulted in those 2 badges

 

You can find both the presentations on slideshare

GroupWave Webinizer from Kris De Bisschop

IBM Domino Hybrid cloud configuration from Kris De Bisschop

IBM Think 2018 – New oxygen for Notes/Domino

Last week I’ve spent a whole week in one of the US cities that never sleeps, Las Vegas. Monday was the most crowdy day, every corridor was packed with attendees. People had to wait in line to have a seat in a session room or in a lab….it seemed to be that the Mandalay Bay could not handle THAT number of attendees.

After monday, when the Expo center was open, people could spread themselves to more open spaces which resulted in a more relax atmosphere.

Back to content now…. it was years ago that I felt such a good vibe, so much positive energy and saw tons of interesting new stuff in an upcoming Notes and Domino release.We are ready to show the world that Notes/Domino is not dead and that there is new oxygen in the products.

In Q4 of 2018, V10 will be released but you will be able to play with it when the beta release comes out within a few months. Interested to know more about the progress of the development or when something important is announced, subscribe then for the newsletter at the following URL: http://www.ibm.com/destinationdomino

So what is there coming in the new release where you can be so excited about ? Here you have an overview of interesting stuff:

You will be able to send fully formatted and intact notes messages as EML attachments.

I here you saying there “what so special about that ?” Well you can group all messages in one single mail and forward those to somebody else. The EML attachment can contain the original mail plus the attachments.

 Next there are some mail policy improvements that can warn a user if they attach too large or too many attachments. This way the user can react before the mail is send out.

They included an extra view in the mailtemplate, the Group By Sender View. This view has all functionality of the inbox view and groups all the mail by sender in one view, even those that are stored in one of your folders.

As calendar improvements, they announced the team calendar. This new team calendar has nothing to do with the Group Calendar that we all know. The team calendar is a standalone database that can include a team inbox and every member can create, edit invites. To have a clear overview with you own calendar, you can configure this team calendar as an overlay over your own calendar.

Another great announced feature is the possibility to invite extra people to a meeting where you are invited to, even when it is a repeated meeting.

How cool is that ?

 I don’t know any other product that can offer this feature !

In the future the footprint of the Notes client will be stripped by removing some features that are not heavily used like the feed reader, the opensocial component and the embedded experience.

They announced a new update process for the client , based on the already successful upgrade process for the cloud-based clients.

The biggest announcement they did was the Domino Top-Secret product, named DominoAppsOnIpad !!

This product is the ICAA client running with his full possibilities on an iPad. This means that you can take your existing Domino Applications with you on the iPad without any development changes. Everything just works, even replication so that you can work offline !

This is the landing page

I opened the Domino Directory

 and even created a document with my name in another application

This product allows to take your apps without any extra cost on a mobile device with all embedded features like doclinks, @formula, lotusscript, dblookups, rich text, table creation……AND replication !

In near future they will allow the possibility to access GPS, camera, files integration,…..

If you want to subscribe to this beta program, go to http://bit.ly/DominoAppsOnIPad to be able to participate in the program.

As stated in the beginning of this article, I feel energized and felt a positive and good vibe around all those interesting announcements for the upcoming V10. We, the ICS community and its ICS Champions are convinced and showed a lot of interest and appreciation to both IBM & HCL for the efforts and the deliverables in this short amount of time. Now it is time to come out of the closet with all those positive messages and show the rest of the world what an amazing products IBM has to offer in the Collaboration world !

More to come in the following weeks, months so stay tuned !

The Collaboration train is going

Tags

#domino2025 domino notes sametime, ibm, social

At the end of october 2017, there was this big announcement “IBM Announces Investment in Notes Domino Version 10 and Beyond”

In the announcement they spoke about the partnership between IBM and HCL and the way the two companies will drive a new wave in the products during 2018 and beyond. They announced the upcoming Domino2025 jam session around the globe and the goal of those jam sessions.

In december I attended the Jam session in Belgium. There was a lot of interest and a lot of great ideas ! We worked in different groups and information has been assembled and brought back to IBM/HCL.

Later on in january 2018 they announced the #Domino2025 online 2-day forum During this online event you could participate in an ideation blog staffed by IBM product management, IBM technical sellers and HCL development teams. You could create your idea and vote on other ideas to visualize the interes in certain features and goals expected from the Community.

This week, the 28th of February, there was the online Domino V10 webinar where they wanted to spread the word about what is coming up based on all the feedback and input they received during the jam sessions and the online forum. In case you missed it, a replay of it can be viewed here

A lot of feedback has been gathered and reviewed and they came to the following conclusions:

• we would like to see the use of modern development tools and frameworks
  • they announced the use of open standards like NodeJS
• we would like a slimmer, faster and better looking Notes client
  • they announced a an auto-update system so that you don’t have to bother about those updates.
• provide a better Microsoft integration for mail and productivity apps
  • there is more to come about this integration but they announced already the use of EWS (Exchange Web Services). This way Outlook will contact Domino and think it’s an Exchange server 🙂

the V10 versions are announced for Q4 2018 but participation in the beta programs will be announced way upfront so that you can taste the (r)evolution in the products. There is a lot to come and stay tuned to see what will be happening in 2018. If you are a customer, looking for a robust collaboration platform, look certainly to the ICS (IBM Collaboration Services) portfolio before you take a decision.

There is a lot to do about TCO and more in the space of reuse stuff you have already and get it integrated. A few examples are mentionned in the below slide like the better integration with Active Directory and the updated support of ADFS4.0 but also the support of Docker to ease the procedures of upgrading your Domino Servers.

In march I attend IBM Think 2018 and more news will be spread over there. For those who can’t attend, a lot of the news will be spread on the #Domino2025 blog and there are also the well known user group events like Engage, SNoUG where you can attend and hear and see about the evolution in the products.

Step together with us on this train and feel the vibe and the positive energy that is encapsulating the ICS Community where you need/can be part of.

Stay tuned for more to come in the next weeks, months, years !